How do you ensure privacy and security on cloud platforms in an age of compromised encryption, backdoors, and AI-driven hacking threats to encryption and user confidentiality?
Let’s say you’ve created a film and need to securely upload the master copy to the cloud. You want to encrypt it before uploading to prevent unauthorized access. What program would you use to achieve this?
Now, let’s consider the worst-case scenario: the encryption software itself could have a backdoor, or perhaps you’re worried about AI-driven hacking techniques targeting your encryption.
Additionally, imagine your film is being used to train AI databases or is exposed to potential brute-force attacks while stored in the cloud.
What steps would you take to ensure your content is protected against a wide range of threats and prevent it from being accessed, leaked, or released without your consent?
If you assume everything is compromised, there is no safety. You have to trust something at some point.
Usually, speaking from a professional IT perspective, people trust encryption. Once you do that, it does not matter how safe or unsafe the place where you store your data is.
AES, the encryption standard used by pretty much everything, is safe. It has not been weakened in any meaningful way since its inception and is also quantum - safe.
You could use for example openssl or Veracrypt or even just 7zip to encrypt it. If you don’t trust these tools, encrypt it twice with two different ones, just put a txt file next to it with the exact steps to decrypt, because you will forget in which order you have done things.
Personally I have a homeserver that is encrypted at rest and then it uses restic to store encrypted backups in the cloud.
Thank you everyone so much for your responses. You’ve truly opened my eyes to so many aspects I hadn’t even considered before.
Your insights were not only thoughtful but also incredibly helpful. It’s rare to come across such comprehensive answers that cover so many angles, and I really appreciate the time and effort you took to share them.
Each of you has given me a lot to think about, and
I’m grateful for the depth of understanding you provided. Thanks again!
As a first step, I’d like to pick one of the programs to start with:
Cryptomator
gocryptfs (not so Windows-friendly)
GnuPG
VeraCrypt (slower than TrueCrypt, and since it’s offered as a replacement, it makes me suspicious, especially since TrueCrypt mysteriously vanished without providing any explanation. Some people believe VeraCrypt might have backdoors, whereas TrueCrypt’s abandonment perhaps didn’t provide any backdoors.)
TrueCrypt (I have used it occasionally on my Windows PC, although it is no longer updated)
Store your own shit on your own Linux server. Don’t trust other companies. Use industry standard libraries like OpenSSH, LUKS.
But do realise that HeartBleed was in a industry standard library so don’t trust it 100% but do keep it patched as much as possible.
True. That was a CVE 10 vulnerability. But unless you are going to airgap your system, I think using these ubiquitous libraries is as good as we can get to being safe.
That is true, which is why you should keep it up to date
This is only really secure if your server is in a trusted location imo
I think that’s covered by “Don’t trust other companies”. You just need a business internet line with a static IP to host your own stuff in your house.
That’s the funny thing about data storage: you don’t.
Encryption mitigates the likelihood of somebody gaining access. But anyone with physical access to the media can potentially gain access to the data - it just may be incredibly difficult to decrypt (or to find a bug that permits decryption).
Software is too complicated to trust. Instead, like other posters have stated, try to work out the least risky storage mechanism.
I’d make that offline backups.
- Download some encryption software,
- disconnect the computer from any networks,
- copy the video onto the computer,
- destroy the device that previously hosted the video,
- encrypt the video,
- copy the decryption key onto other media,
- copy the encrypted file onto a number of SD cards
- destroy the encrypting computer.
- Send a few copies of the encrypted file on SD cards to people unlikely to decrypt it.
- Retire to my log cabin in the woods.
Just stop putting important stuff on the cloud…
Like. You’re asking the best way to safely secure the $100 bill you taped to the sidewalk outside your house.
There’s measures you can take, but at the end of the day why are you so set on taping a Benjamin to the sidewalk?
gocryptfs is what I’d use for this. It’s designed with cloud storage in mind
Using strong encryption should be enough for your use case, unless you’re a high profile target. Even then, it’s more likely whoever is after you will try to get access to your unencrypted files instead because cracking strong encryption isn’t worth it most of the time
Iirc your cloud service provider could still figure out your unencrypted directory layout and filenames. You should really do some research on this if you wanna make sure you know all the risks
I appreciate your suggestion very much. I wonder what the difference between gocryptfs and others like Trucrypt would be.
Need to search and compare the pros and cons of both, the advantages and disadvantages of each, particularly in terms of security, ease of use, and performance
Cryptomator is the most frictionless one
I’m going to deviate a bit from your question, since you asked a bunch of questions, and aim at the implied question underneath: “is there any hope for a non-expert?”
A Synology network attached storage device (NAS) provides reasonably good answers to the question “how can I have privacy and have some backups” without being a Linux expert.
It ships with apps that replace common cloud services with local backup equivalents.
It can also be configured to do local encryption before backing up to a cloud service, for data where disaster resilience is more critical than privacy (i.e. a library of family photos).
Edit: And as others have explained - we must always remember that the cloud is just someone else’s computer.
